A large variety of mobile information processing devices (“Mobile Devices”) are produced each year. Most Mobile Devices currently available contain an operating system (“Mobile Operating System”) to process information and run mobile applications. Most Mobile Devices currently available also utilize visual displays (“Mobile Display”) to show information about the current status of the device, and to allow the device user to interact with software applications running on the device. These Mobile Displays can be manufactured from any number of technologies but are generally some form of flat LCD panel. The growing capabilities of Mobile Devices have led to a rapid expansion in the number of software applications, such as mobile games and mobile internet content, being developed for these devices. It has also led to a proliferation of downloadable background images or “wallpaper”, and musical songs played during an incoming call or “ringtones”. Together these applications and downloadable files are referred to as mobile content (“Mobile Content”).
Due to the variety of Mobile Operating Systems available, and the variety of Mobile Displays that are used by the devices, it is necessary for Mobile Content developers to test their applications for compatibility on a large number of Mobile Devices, often several hundred unique models.
Previously, the majority of this testing was performed by purchasing a copy of each target Mobile Device and manually testing the Mobile Content on each device. This manual Mobile Operating System and Mobile Display compatibility testing has become one of the most expensive and time consuming activities related to Mobile Content development, often representing 20-30% of the cost of Mobile Content. Hence there is a need for reliable test systems which can be used to simplify or automate the testing process for this Mobile Content.
There are two basic approaches to simplifying the complexity of Mobile Content testing, and providing a unified test system for Mobile Content development.
The first approach is to attempt to emulate each type of Mobile Operating System available. Although some systems do exist that emulate specific functionality of Mobile Operating Systems (such as their internet browsers), even these limited systems have been found to be unrepresentative of the actual behavior when Mobile Content is loaded onto a physical Mobile Device. Unfortunately, attempts to expand the scope, or improve the accuracy of these limited Mobile Operating Systems emulations, have proven impractical due to the complexity of the Mobile Operating Systems and the rapid pace at which new Mobile Devices are being developed. Systems utilizing this approach have therefore not been widely adopted due to these limitations.
The second approach is to emulate each type of Mobile Display available, while still loading the Mobile Content onto a physical Mobile Device. This approach allows the Mobile Content to be viewed and managed using a standardized interface, such as a desktop computer application, while still providing a completely representative view of the behavior of the application on the target Mobile Operating System.
Previously, it was not possible to emulate the wide variety of Mobile Displays because there was no system that could adapt to the different types of Mobile Displays available. For example, a survey of 493 Mobile Devices determined that there were 210 unique Mobile Display configurations, and 1,154 unique image processing commands (“Image Commands”) used to display information on the Mobile Displays. Image processing commands are the low level instructions used to render display information on a Mobile Display.
Therefore, there is a need for adaptive Mobile Display emulation which can convert the variety of Mobile Displays into common image data formats (“Unified Image Formats”) such as 24 Bit RGB, GIF, JPEG, or MPEG, or any other format suitable for viewing on a desktop computer system. Once the information is available in a Unified Image Format, many other applications can be designed to simplify manual or automated testing of Mobile Content (“Manual Or Automated Test Interfaces”).